Angela Carter's Mannerism in Rudolf Its Curious Room
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SBORNfK PRACf FILOZOFICKE FAKULTY BRNENSKE UNIVERZITY STUDIA MINORA FACULTATIS PHILOSOPHICAE UNIVERSITATIS BRUNENSIS S 5, 1999 — BRNO STUDIES IN ENGLISH 25 MILADA FRANKOVA ANGELA CARTER'S MANNERISM IN RUDOLF ITS CURIOUS ROOM Definitions of mannerism in prose usually concede the vagueness of the term, but generally agree in pointing out the ingenious ornateness and self consciously elaborate manner as common denominators of the style in whatever period. From the Mannerist Period of the High Renaissance to the present time, mannerism has also been associated with the flouting of rules. All this is where Angela Carter's self-declared mannerism fits the definitions. With her bizarre amalgam of highly literary delicacy and grossness, Carter, as Walter Kendric puts it, "triumphs over form, content, structure, tone, every genteel shibboleth."1 Carter describes the theatricality and overflowing fluency of her style, which has by some been criticised for overwriting and artificiality, as mannerist, con sciously cultivated and developed from her earlier expressionist manner.2 The richness of her texts accommodates all kinds of incongruous encounters which constitute an essential part of Carter's allure: reality with fantasy, layers of the past with various layers of the present, fairy-tale worlds with postmodern theo ries or allegory with what she refers to as materialism. The posthumously published collection of Carter's short stories American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (1993) contains a tale whose very title is sug gestive of strange meetings: "Alice in Prague or the Curious Room". In it Car ter's multilayered encounters in the famous Kunstkammer of Rudolf II— Renaissance monarch, lover of the arts and patron of several notable Mannerist painters, sculptors and craftsmen—make fascinating reading, not least for a Czech reader at a time of renewed interest in Rudolf II enhanced by the exte n- sive 1997 Prague exhibition, which gathered together many items of the Em peror's once remarkable collection of arts and curiosities. To sample the play of Walter Kendric, "The Real Magic of Angela Carter", in Robert E. Hosmer Jr., ed., Contempo rary British Women Writers. London: Macmillan 1993,66. John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview. London: Methuen 1985,91. 128 MILADA FRANKOVA Carter's postmodern mannerism in the Mannerist setting of Rudolf's "Curious Room" is the purpose of this article. It was not until the 1980s that Angela Carter's work gained the wide popu larity it still enjoys. Her three 1960s novels (Shadow Dance, 1966; The Magic Toyshop, 1967; Heroes and Villains, 1969), feminist and experimental, were somewhat ahead of their time and while welcomed as bold inventions, they were also criticised for pornographic and sado-masochistic sexual openness. Drawing on feminist and post-structuralist critical theories and pointing to per ceptible shifts in social attitudes, Carter explained her approach to be aimed at the demythologisation of old social constructs which make people unfree.3 Al though deconstruction of myths about women is alleged to be the clue to her prose, she denied writing in the service of feminist ideas, because what she wanted was to create space for a broad discussion about social injustice and ine quality and about the relativity of views.4 However, these seemingly straight forward theses hardly provide Carter's reader with ready-made interpretations of her tales even if s/he keeps in mind her credo, namely, that if fiction has a moral function, it is "to find out about things [rather than] telling people how to behave."5 Nevertheless, Carter's "finding out about things", too, remains am biguous and fluid under the rich layers of sensual images, verbal opulence of allusion and metaphor, Utopian or dystopic fantasy, comedy and cruelty which compose the postmodern cacophony of the Carterian text. Yet there is an unde niable cohesion between Carter's mannerism and her magic realism to which, too, she acknowledges allegiance. Her language—in Salman Rushdie's words, "pitched high and replete with symbols"6—contributes towards creating the sense of the fantastic which underlies magic realism. Although Carter's name only has been connected with magic realism since her 1984 novel Nights at the Circus, there is no doubt that from the very beginning her novels and short sto ries had contained all the essential signs that characterise the mode: extravagant fabulation in a realistic frame, fantastic turns of events or other encounters with the supernatural mixed with fairytale, folklore and mythical elements. All of them had formed the very substance of literary "Carterland" already during the two preceding decades and therefore confirm Carter's independence of other magic realists such as Gtinter Grass or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Moreover, Carter herself explains that the differences between her work and that of South American novelists or even Salman Rushdie stem from the different back grounds and social forces that helped to produce their writing. Her British back ground does not supply her with such sources of fantastic material as Marquez draws on in Colombian folklore or Rushdie when writing about shamans. Hers is fantasy and fabulation of her own making, spell-binding inventions for which 3 Angela Carter, "Notes from the Front Line", in Michelene Wandor, ed.. On Gender and Writing. London: Pandora Press 1973, 69-77. 4 Haffenden, 93-4. 5 Ibid., 96. 6 Salman Rushdie's Introduction to The Collected Angela Carter: Burning Your Boats Stories. London: Chatto and Windus 1995, ix. ANGELA CARTER'S MANNERISM IN RUDOLF H"S CURIOUS ROOM 129 she uses the European (literary) heritage as a kind of folklore, albeit "folklore of the intelligentsia."7 The short story "Alice in Prague or the Curious Room" with its multiple cross-referencing between different times and distant, though European, cul tures is a good case in point. It offers an interesting miniature of the Carterian "bricolage"8 resulting from reactions to literary experience and other stimuli from the whole of Western European culture which make up the elements of the imaginative life. The story takes us to the pulsing heart of Rudolfian Pra gue—Rudolfs Kunstkammer, where we find the well-known English Renais sance mathematician and astrologer Doctor Dee contemplating his crystal ball, which "contains everything that is, or was, or ever shall be."9 In this tableau10 composed of a plethora of allusions Carter evokes a period in European history, art and thought ingeniously woven from a skein of symbols and metaphors which harmonise with the idea of the Renaissance. (She compares this tech nique to the way Renaissance writers referred to the Classics.11 (Rudolf II, King of Bohemia and Hungary and Holy Roman Emperor of the Germans (whom Carter unaccountably reduces to a mere Archduke), and his famed collection symbolise the Renaissance longing for knowledge supported by a belief in won ders. Carter's Dr Dee would like to mate Rudolfs bottled mermaid with an an gel who, as everybody knows, could step out of his crystal. Nor does Carter's Renaissance hom of plenty lack a sprinkling of coarse burlesque hu mour—when the Iron Mask Ned Kelly muses at his scrying disk whether "it is cold enough in Prague to let him piss an arc of ice." (p. 127) Historical accuracy is clearly not Carter's concern. Historians have no cause to disprove Dr Dee's diary,12 according to which he was only given one brief audience by Rudolf (on 3rd September 1584) at which Kelly was not present and resented it. During their stay in Prague (with interruptions from 1584 to 1586) they did conduct seances when the Archangels allegedly spoke to them through the crystal, but they were barred access to the court and Rudolfs pres ence and in fact had to face a great deal of hostility, gossip and intrigue against them. Eventually they were banished from Prague by Rudolf in May 1586 and only allowed to stay at Tfebofi in southern Bohemia under the protection of Vilem of Rozmberk. They seem to have outstayed also Roimberk's welcome by 1589, when Dr Dee with his large family returned to England13 while Edward 7 Haffenden, 81-2. 8 Ibid., 92. 9 Angela Carter, American Ghosts and Old World Wonders. London: Vintage 1993, 121. 10 Loma Sage remarks on the "still" quality of Carter's plots in Women in the House of Fiction, London: Macmillan 1992, 169. This short story has little plot and even less movement. 11 Haffenden, 92. 12 E.g. Robert J. W. Evans, Rudolf 11 and His World. Oxford University Press 1973; Rudolf 11 a jeho svit. Praha: Mlada fronta 1997, 266-7. John Dee, Private Diary, ed. J. O. Halliwell, London 1842. 13 Claude Postel used three autobiographical texts of Dr Dee, including his Private Diary in John Dee, Le Mage de la Ruelle d 'Or. Paris: Les Belles Lettres 1995; John Dee, Mag ze Zlate ulicTcy. Praha: Lidov6 noviny 1996. 130 MILADA FRANKOVA Kelly reemerged in Prague and briefly enjoyed the Emperor's favour until in 1591 Rudolf ordered his imprisonment, the details of which are unclear as are the circumstances and the date of Kelly's death in Bohemia, probably in 1597. From this brief outline of historical facts it is obvious that there was none of the radiant harmony that Carter's picture of the Curious Room suggests. The discrepancy between fact and fiction may either be one of Carter's demytholo- gising ploys, a parody of the proverbial tolerance of the Rudolfian court, which was as relative as Elizabethan "Merry England"14, or she may be putting fantasy purely in the service of experiment where her own quest for "finding out about things" ingeniously parallels Dr Dee's unquenchable thirst for learning.